Metaphors, Lists and Priorities
by kdntjb
Summary: Aubrey's a teenage girl so, of course, she hates plenty of things about herself. Liking girls, however, is not one of those things. It's, maybe, the one thing that she'll disagree with her father about to no end. That's okay too. Loving people doesn't always mean agreeing with them. (In which Aubrey grows up, finds the meaning of love and turns out surprisingly well-adjusted.) Gen.


**Metaphors, Lists and Priorities**

_**Notes**__: This is two tumblr prompts gone wild. Check it out on AO3 if you want more notes on purpose/possible sequels._

* * *

Aubrey doesn't have time to dig herself out of mountains of self-doubt. There are plenty of things she could think about if she wanted to wallow in self-pity and crippling inadequacy (she's catalogued them all as points for improvement to anchor her whenever she feels particularly cocky) but the point is that wallowing is self-indulgent and inefficient. Everyone on earth has a very finite span of existence and Aubrey intends to put every second to good use.

The plan sounds much easier than the execution.

Most things in life are like that. (After all, if achieving something was as simple as declaring your intent to pursue it, the world would be a much better place.)

The reality is as such, though: the world is a sack of crap. The world doesn't exactly conspire against you, but it's certainly not your friend. And should you choose to pursue anything at all, you'd best pursue it with every fibre of your being lest the world beat you down and leave you with nothing to your name. A Posen does not back down from anything, least of all the world because when the world bears down on you, it will leave you with nothing. You fight and you claw and you never stop or else there was no point in trying at all. It is either get to the top, or die in free fall. Those are the odds the world, uncaring and unflinching as it will ever be, stacks impassively against everyone who inhabits it.

Of all the things her father has taught her, Aubrey thinks that lesson stands shoulders above the rest.

* * *

Aubrey is a satellite in orbit around her mother.

That's how it is in the beginning, anyway. They think the same, hum the same songs and harmonize when they do so without ever having to talk. Her mom will pet her hair and tell her stories out of history, out of literature, out of the meeting of a gangly, awkward soldier and a Southern debutante and how they ran away with each other though, more often than not, they morph into the story of how a scared little boy ran away from everything in the world.

It seems like Aubrey and her mother for the longest time, left behind in some sort of rough side or adrift on an ocean. It's her mother that teaches her the drumbeat of her own heart and the pitter-patter of thoughts darting through her head as fast as she wants them and of women standing tall and proud through a storm. Her mother teaches her about dignity and grace and cutting, cutting stares right through a person: how to push people aside and how to make them help you; the malleability of the water that cuts through stone with nothing but time and force of will. (Her father has force behind him but it's a concrete power. Her mother's is an abstract, a fluid thing that eludes him completely.)

It's a striking image but one that Aubrey can tell won't ever settle quite right no matter how she pulls it over her skin. She traces the lines of her face in her mirror through her father's grey-green eyes and knows the reason why it doesn't fit.

* * *

Aubrey remembers the absences more clearly than the presences. It's like a portrait where the most striking element is the painter's use of negative space. The darkness swallows the subjects but it also frames them, presents them clearly and strongly in the canvas.

When he is around, he father is a symbol. 'Shock and awe' got tossed around a lot in the news those days and to this day it's a phrase imprinted onto the image of memory Aubrey has of him. To a child he seems above everything else. That's the intention of the uniform, at least.

If family is a painting, then marriage is a symphony. (Her schoolyard fantasies are, at the very least, comforting in their impotency. They're music box jingles compared to the show she's presented with every night.) The performance has it's movements, each one part of a whole piece but sounding so totally different even though the composer is the same and the orchestra hasn't changed. It's layered with a theme in the first violins that won't stop humming incessant, beautiful, but somehow _off_ – like someone didn't manage to quite tune their instrument in time for the show. She hears it: the allegro that sets the norm, where there's contemplation that gets swept aside by the lively tempo like time won't allow the musicians to dwell too much on the way the notes look on the staves; a sullen adagio, mulled by pauses and lingering doubt, blame and the staccato of verbal jabs and harsh eyes; the abrupt scherzo of cheerful almost banter, like they're honeymooning again; return to allegro and repeat ad nauseam like the composer wrote the whole thing to go on loop.

It's unfair because symphonies are meant to be performed live. They're like theatre – there's an innate humanity in them you can only get with the energy of a player. Symphonies aren't meant to be composed on infinite loop. The song is beautiful, but the musicians are just left playing and playing until their hands bleed.

Love seems painful.

* * *

Liking girls is not something Aubrey dwells on. After all, liking boys isn't something she dwells on either. Liking anyone is tangential, really, to academic and extracurricular success.

Socialization, though sometimes a nice respite, is optional and frivolous. Aubrey knows enough to talk to people without offending them. She knows all the niceties and the pomp and circumstance that goes hand in hand with rituals of propriety: things like professionalism, geniality, and amiable dislike. It's more than enough to cover all her bases.

Boys are nice to look at, but so immature – dating one is just a disaster waiting in the wings.

Girls smell nice, but there's just so much complications to deal with them – Aubrey's got enough drama on her own shoulders; she can't deal with the baggage from someone else's head.

Aubrey is pretty, smart and athletic. That's enough.

That's what makes popular.

* * *

There are plenty of things to occupy herself with at school. It's a stage show where everyone improvises their lines, but the archetypical characters are still there. School is a backdrop whizzing past, like in scenes of old cartoons where they loop a canvas behind people running in place.

That's an accurate descriptor too, actually, about how she feels most of the time – like she's stuck on a treadmill that slows but never stop, always moving but never going. The routine is comforting because, wherever she goes, the landscape may differ but the routine is the same. She can't remember living in a place without 'Fort' in its name but she remembers where she was every time they lowered the flag. She remembers standing at attention and silence. It melds all into one but the borders are there so it's easy to recall the clarity of every moment, every day in every place. There's a sort of comfort, maybe, knowing what to do no matter how alien things first appear.

They move and move and move, but there are always flags that flutter in the sky and there are always men in crisp uniforms and there is always that tingling _sense_ of order in the machine. She doesn't mind it at all. The things she leaves behind are like postcards in a scrapbook or (though she won't deign to admit it) lost-cause problems half-solved. There's no sentiment involve in walking away from those.

She enjoys moving. Posens are like sharks: when they stop, they die. When nothing changes, they die. When there is no challenge or current to swim against, they die. That's why it's important to have a cause, a calling, a purpose. Currently, Aubrey's is figuring out hers. So moving is good because it enables that sort of a search.

Her feet itch.

* * *

Home is not a place.

She's glad it isn't, because, if it was, the world would probably rip it apart the second she wasn't looking. She's glad it's not, because she's seen places get blown up and torn asunder but knows ideas are invincible. (The history books agree with as much, even if she had to dig behind the words to know they did.)

If home _were_ a place, maybe it'd be airports or cardboard boxes or the smell of bubble wrap and packing tape. Aubrey loves airports. Everyone is waiting for something at an airport and, there, Aubrey can pretend the things she's waiting for will be coming soon too.

Sometimes she wonders what it'd be like to wrap up a thousand memories and keep them tied to the floorboards of house or in the lattice of a window, but that just seems tragic – like she's living in prison of regret (she has enough of those already) or drowning in dissonant emotions. It must be awful, actually, to define your existence to a plot of land or a backyard where you used to skin your knees and eat dirt as a joke. It must be like a constant reminder of everything you used to be, or couldn't be, or wish you were.

And the worst thing about places, apart from their history, is their fragility. She's seen the world bear down on a place and wipe it away in the wind like dust off a creaking shelf.

But home's not a place. Home's not tangible in the way school is tangible or the way heavy-set concrete walls and chain link fences are.

Home is people.

* * *

When her father is home, and these are rare occasions, he spends time with her mother. That's natural. Her mother and her father need time to remember they're husband and wife too. When she was younger, she was a little resentful. Now, she supposes, having the marriage stay intact was better for everyone's long-run survival.

He's absent even when he's around, but Aubrey's grown to be able to read the fine nuance between the two situations. Sometimes he's really _here_, back from whatever fort he was last posted in but sometimes he's still out _there_, thinking of bunkers and munitions and line upon lines of men counting on him.

She like having him around, even if he second-guesses every choice she makes. It's a complicated feeling but Aubrey's complicated and she can tell that those are often the parts of her that came from her father. He's brusque and brash and yells and has trouble smiling but maybe that's just what makes it easy for Aubrey to understand. It how he treats his troops, almost, only these days he's better at catching himself and remembering where to slot in 'daughter' to color the context of her loyalty.

He's trying.

Anyone else wouldn't understand it. To an outsider, her father is an austere tyrant: he snarls at everything out of place, he does white glove inspections for dust, he checks that her bed's made into perfect hospital corners and even bounces a quarters off them to make sure. That's just the way he's always been, though, and Aubrey's lived long enough to see the man behind the spit shined shoes and perfectly creased uniform.

There's something they share, just the two of them, in the way they aspire to something great. Aubrey can never quite grasp it, but she's always reaching, reaching, reaching for it even if she can't quite tell what it is. An ideal, maybe, but it shines as bright as any dream she's had. It seems like something worthwhile to pursue. It sounds like family and duty and honor.

It sounds like service.

(Sometimes, though, it feels like her father's climbing after it and straggling behind, chasing his shadow.)

* * *

There are plenty of things about herself Aubrey doesn't like. She's a teenage girl, after all, and that's a demographic that will always be clawing at the tattered promise of self-worth no matter how outwardly secure they appear or inwardly secure they think they are.

Everyone has flaws. Aubrey just takes great pains to minimize hers. It only seems logical, after all, because what idiot goes around advertising all their weak spots? (Her family can see hers like they're a lit up landing strip; she doesn't need any help figuring out where they lie.)

In any case, Aubrey has just cause to hate dozens of things about herself. There's no point ignoring the existence of any one of these things. She's working on them. She made a list, crossing items off as they're done away with: smothered out of existence, stamped away into the ether or, in the rare case, carefully excised by hindsight and maturity.

Likings girls is not something that ever goes on that list. It's, maybe, the one thing that she'll disagree with her father about to no end. Liking girls isn't something to be eroded away by epiphanies or something that gets shaken out of her heart, passing through like a chilly breeze.

It's just something she does.

(She has a book, though, and in it she writes down all the things she doesn't hate, just in case those go away too.)

* * *

Aubrey admires her father.

One morning, they eat breakfast together in tidy silence because her mother's off visiting relatives or maybe running errands or perhaps just ill. (Aubrey's memory captures the most bizarre things in perfect clarify but lets other things slip away like desert sand. Her father's much the same and that's the only reason she doesn't mind it.)

He grunts something at her, and glances over to the coat hanging next to the door. Aubrey puts it on even through she adjusted to the weather months ago (leagues apart from Hawaiian heat) and the she likes the chill in her bones when she cuts through the wind. She'll oblige his worries. It's the closest they'll get to whatever it is she wants from him. (Even she's not sure what it's called.)

He looks at her one more time as she reaches for the door, and she can feel his eyes on her back so she turns and looks back, just as resolute – his mirror.

It's something like relief in his eyes. Pride, even. Satisfaction. Or maybe love. Whatever it is, he's bad at it.

That's okay. Aubrey's bad at it too.

* * *

When she says she 'likes' people in the context of really _liking_ them, it's a complicated sort of thing to describe. Aubrey hasn't really had a crush on anybody in the sense that media and endless hallway chatter seem to tout as the standard MO with which infatuation happens but it's not like Aubrey doesn't get what's happening with all the chemicals and the hormones and sudden desire to masturbate.

(She's not afraid of that word either, not even when it got whispered around the quad and no one could keep a straight face talking about it directly.)

For instance, she recognizes Michael Venetti, who goes around in nothing but T-shirts and ripped jeans even when frost starts to bite in the wind, is quite the looker. His toned arms are always on display and it's not like the solid curve of his broad shoulders ever escapes her notice. She likes the sharp line of his jaw and the hazel-gold of his eyes against the honey-brown of his skin, especially when he's being devious and the sun catches him as he plays truant. She likes how tousled his hair always looks, and thinks, on more than one occasion, what it'd be like to run her hands through it. She likes that, for all his macho posturing, he'll look her in the eyes and doesn't laugh in the slightest when she gets up in class presentations and waxes lyrical about dreams of law and politics.

It's not butterflies or a warm feeling. It's just something she may or may not have decided. Maybe it'd be better to say it was an attraction, only that's not quite right either. Michael is handsome, which makes him convenient to like, but, more importantly, he's interesting. (He's also a boy. It makes him easy to like and lets Aubrey answer typical hallway gossip without ever having to lie.)

* * *

Aubrey knows her father wanted a son to carry his name. He wanted a son to carry his legacy and to grow into his footsteps, following him into some godforsaken desert or bright shining light or even a coffin draped with flags.

Aubrey's over that.

She's done with that sort of longing. She's done outdoing boys, learning how to aim a rifle and be his ersatz-son, paraded around at skeet shooting tournaments and county fairs only to be ignored again once the set was cleaned up.

When she looked up at her father's steely gaze and his clenched jaw, she used to thing playing the son would bridge a gap between them. It used to work: sports, science, math; everything that remotely resembled a playing field of testosterone. Winning. Competition. She argued. She fought. She even got into the schoolyard brawls and won. But there just came a point, probably when she looked in the mirror and saw her mother's curves instead of her father's sharp angles, where neither of them could pretend it was a system that worked.

Failure hits her hard, because she's been instructed not to. Aubrey can't do many things for her family; she's a child, or at least that's what everybody keeps telling her. Right now, all she has are chances to make them happy. Any punishment in the world pales against the thought of disappointing them.

But that's not right either. That feeling used to be the only thing that coiled in her gut and made her want to retch. But she's done, and that feeling wants to hurl itself away to make way for something else she doesn't really understand.

It feels like resentment.

(But that's wrong. Why'd she be thinking about that?)

* * *

One time she goes to a party.

Somehow, probably at the behest of a dare gone wrong (Aubrey is competitive in the worst ways), she ends up making out in a closet with Jennifer McClusky. This is good because Jennifer has eyes that should be illegally blue, legs that go all the way up to Canada and lips that are really, really soft. Aubrey hasn't entertained the notion of Jennifer McClusky as a romantic prospect but, at this point, why the hell not? They run in the same social circles and, at any rate, the pining will be easier (or even non-existent if the way Jennifer's tongue is moving in her mouth means anything).

Making out in a closet becomes making out in front of a crowd. That's less enjoyable, but okay too since it's how Piper Hart and Jeremy Sachs ended up kicking off their diabetes inducting nine-month romance. There's something to be said about being _seen_ anyway that makes electricity thunder down her spine.

When they break apart for air, giggling and silly from everything and nothing in particular, Aubrey thinks things are great. This isn't going to be anything like how Ricky West kissed her in fifth grade and then proceeded to sabotage her science fair project out of spite or a juvenile sense of attraction. Girls are leagues apart from boys, especially at this age.

But that's not how it works out. She tries approaching Jennifer with shy smiles at lunch the next day but the other girl says things about Yelena Trent, the only out girl in school, allegedly perving on her in gym for just existing and disparaging things that make Aubrey wish party lesbianism really was just a definition on the internet.

Boys are stupid but girls suck too.

Aubrey remembers why all of this wasn't a priority.

* * *

Family's important.

A man's family reflects his ability as a leader, or so she's told. That's how her father sees it anyway: a world where he's the General and her mother the Lieutenant. (She tries not the think too hard about her rank, probably the lowly recruit. But if she does well enough, maybe she'll get promoted to noncom.)

Aubrey's never doubted for a second that her parents love her, both of them, because that's not the point and that's not what she was ever looking to get from them. It's easy with her mother, and most things usually are, because she's _around_ and they're the ostensibly similar. Even the parts of them that aren't the same can be dissected by time and familiarity. Her father's love is different and awkward and scarcely feels like the thing at all but perseveres regardless.

That doesn't make her feel any less like a chess piece on a board, on display in a glass case at a museum, all for daddy's benefit. Once she heard a story about an officer's fifteen-year-old daughter stirring up a scandal by sleeping with the enlisted men. Intellectually, she knew she should be horrified, but all she could think was how that was a spectacular way to get back at your father.

Children are the legacies of their parents but things are different when you're a girl. Aubrey's more and more aware of that as the years flit by. Aubrey is a reflection of everything her father stands for. She can't build up his legacy, like a son could. But she could destroy everything in a second if she wanted.

She hopes, maybe, he's a little afraid of that.

* * *

Aubrey's been assured that the posting is permanent, that there'll be no move half-way through a year, that she can _settle_ but she always holds her breathe – it's more comforting in case she needs to fall. She's getting a little old, maybe, to keep up this sort of nomadic apathy, so she follows orders and attempts to lay down something like roots.

Roosevelt High is an unremarkable school in an unremarkable part of Gary, Indiana. It's as though the place was handpicked for it's bland Middle-America qualities and, upon close reflection, it probably was. (Her parents will never knock on her door before the enter, but try to be considerate in the oddest ways.)

Michael talks to her sometimes. It's easier to think of him as a person, now, instead of an aesthetic or an archetype because she knows the timescale's getting dragged out. As a result, there needs to be a greater richness to everything she knows about everything around her now. It removes her prerogative to ignore him, at any rate, so she learns things about him whether she intends to or not.

He's not shy, per se, but it's painfully obvious a lot of him is the bluster of bravado and he's trying to be cool by playing hard to get. It's all the more convenient for her, really, because it gives her an excuse not to go out on dates.

It's nice. Talking to Michael. It's not objectionable in the least. She hates the way he pronounces a loan word no matter the language it was loaned from, she thinks he needs to get a haircut even if his cheek bones are great and she finds the way he accepts absolutely none air of uppity, preppy disdain she wears. His taste in music is alternative, but tolerably so, and there is a significant part of Aubrey that likes the fact they can argue about anything and everything without hard feelings. Michael has skin as thick as Kevlar and a smile as dangerous as blown shrapnel.

If they hurt each other's feelings, it's not enough for either of them to notice.

* * *

The thing about being her father's daughter is that approval necessitates a degree of invisibility. It's not his nature to praise what's to be expected, and what's to be expected of her is excellence. 'A's on report cards and school medals around her neck merit no notice; it's just their absence that invites harsh glares and harsher words. She's been told to do well, after all, and anything less isn't inadequacy, it's _insubordination_. Her father is a man who's grown to get everything he asks for, everything he orders because that's the nature of his job and even if he tries to hang his hat up before he sit down at the table as a father, there are parts of him that are still stuck somewhere else.

Her mother doesn't help her case. She tries to appease his wishes. Aubrey's starting to chafe under the rules that used to comfort her – like a kid too big for a woolen blanket. (A blanket that was thrown on in December but won't get removed even though it's already July.)

She starts to resent her mother a little, actually, and all of her sudden her soft power is just _soft_ – docility and domesticity and a thousand dreams piled up and burned at an altar of a show marriage. She remembers her mother's stories of being a college girl and sticking it to her parents and dreams of life in the big city, all by herself, and giving all that up to run away with a boy who'd become the father of her little girl.

Sometimes she feels guilty. Mostly she feels sick.

* * *

She makes no particular secret of what she thinks of Michael since he is, after all, her de facto answer to old question of romance that rings through school.

What she feels for him exists, but is unnecessary. A part of her entertains how much it would upset her father and urges her to go for it, but another side cautions as to how much attention from her father she can get before things go back to feeling like a straight-jacket instead of a blanket that was yanked away just when she was getting warm.

(Her and her dad have a complicated relationship, but that doesn't ever shake the respect she has for him.)

Leo Bertrand corners her one evening after Choir. He's tall and witty and if she squints he sort of looks like Michael, perhaps even better from the right angles. It's fitting, because they're the sort of friends who consider themselves brothers in most respects. (She checked.) Leo has a crooked smile on his face and a dark gleam in his eye.

She rejects him before he even has time to pick out words. When he registers what happened, he skulks off, but he can see how he turns the corner a little too quickly and duck into a the homeroom he shares with Michael. There's whispering that wouldn't pass for whispering anywhere else but high school behind the door.

Not pursuing Michael is a good call. He's interesting, yes, but he's so predictable – like a novel that's entertaining but derivative.

It's getting dull.

* * *

Aubrey reads a lot. Maybe that's what makes her strange. She spends an awful lot of energy, at any rate, hating people from just the words they've committed to paper.

Everyone keeps trying to push love as this absolute – this universally recognizable standard of brilliance. Love as a singular ideal: the union of two people who want the same things, going to the same place with the same luggage for the trip and the same way or something similar to it. There's this sense that people can be perfect fits for each other, slotting together to fill all the gaps in their lives. It's an idea that two people can mean everything to each other: like someone out there carries all the parts of your heart that were missing but got found again and put them finally, perfectly where it they were meant to be.

Aubrey calls bullshit.

People get together because they want, not because they're puzzle pieces. And even if they were, it's not always a perfect fit. People push, and push and squeeze pieces together to, even if they don't fit right they interlock in the frame. It doesn't matter if the pieces weren't made to fit together because people will decide to join them up anyway. And why not? The world may be a factory, but people are entitled to assemble their puzzles in whatever way they like, especially with the knowledge that half the pieces they have were probably redundant or defective and that everyone one there got randomly assigned pieces to hundreds of thousands of pictures that no got the box image of.

Maybe it's better that way. Aubrey loves perfection, but you don't have to be perfect to be in love. That's the best thing about it. The pieces can be broken or different and the factory could never have ever imagined someone making art from them they way they do, but how is the thing they put together any less of a picture than the 'right' fit? Pictures are pictures are pictures.

The pieces of hearts everyone carries are special, because they can change. They don't fit all at once and things that used to fit together end up not fitting if you leave them sitting there too long, the way flower petals dry and change under the sun. The world bears down on everything and that's fine too. You have to work for it. You have to _earn_ it. You have to change, adapt, strive towards something greater than yourself, strive towards something for love because that's no less valid than happening to own pieces that just happen to fit.

Love isn't happy. It's fixing things. It's handing the way the world presses down or heats up or tears apart from the seams. It's painful. It's wanting to run away to places the world can't find you, threatening to throw the whole picture into the dump just to escape this horrific thing that's trying to stop your from finishing the puzzle, it's the thing that keeps you trying to solve the mess even when nothing will stop hurting.

She realizes, maybe, the broken symphony of her parents' marriage isn't that broken at all. It's not song on repeat. It's a song in composition. No one can stop playing, because they're not at the end yet.

Stopping would be a disservice to the music.

* * *

Lydia Goldberg's interesting. More interesting than Michael, really.

Lydia's not pretty or beautiful or cute the way people might say when they fawn over girls. Aubrey doesn't even know how it starts. One day she glosses over Lydia's existence (horn-rimmed glasses, baggy cardigans and Converses with mismatching laces that coordinate to whatever ratty paperback she's reading that week) and then eventually the image of Lydia thumbing awkwardly through the library sticks in her mind like gum on her shoe.

Her mother once told her if you love someone, but then love someone else, you should pick the second person because, if you really loved the first, you wouldn't have fallen for the second.

Aubrey doesn't quite categorize her interest in Lydia Goldberg as 'falling for' anyone as such, but it's a quiet step up from the gurgling with Michael. Aubrey doesn't feel much aside from the compulsion to be _nice_ to Lydia (though it may dent her carefully crafted persona of cool ambition and detachment) and a desire to want to touch her hand a lot, but that's easily resisted.

Ignoring the way her thoughts circle around Michael and Lydia (mostly Lydia these days) is problematic. They fester in her head worse than hunger or thirst or an urge to flip the TV on instead of read her textbooks. Indulging once in a while is human and it keeps her attention going, so she let's her thoughts wander to pretty eyes and shy smiles and really, really wanting to holding hands.

Still, it's more fun, she finds, to learn about Lydia without ever having to know her too well. That sort of thing is a liability and Aubrey can't afford distractions when school's at stake. She's got her priorities. (High school ebbs and wanes with all sorts of goals, flitting in an out of her attention faster than the tides of fashion.)

She tries a little harder to learn than she did with Michael, mostly because Lydia keeps to herself where Michael broadcasts the comings and goings of his life to everyone in range and enjoys how the myths blow up and out. For Lydia, she burns some favors and shakes some trees and gets stories about a girl who loves cats and reggae-jazz and urban-fantasy novels and scribbles poems into notebooks thinking all there is to Haiku's is counting the syllables. (By that point, it's too late and Aubrey can't muster up any distaste for the art-house poetry even though it is so childish because _Lydia_ wrote it and things in her head get muddy whenever that name gets thrown around.) She knows what clubs Lydia's in, what her day's like, what lunches her mother tends to brown bag for her and a short-list of birthdays and important anniversaries in her life which are mostly for movies and TV shows she's terribly fond of.

Later in life, Aubrey learns this sort of activity could be categorized as stalking and resolves to that in the list of things to work on.

* * *

Aubrey makes it through high school at the top of the food chain, riding vapors of a rumored college boyfriend who may or may into be Canadian and her own sparkling overachievement. She doesn't quite make Valedictorian, but commiserates herself with the Roosevelt High Perfect Attendance Award her father sniffs at.

She talks to Lydia only a handful of times and indulges herself for the last time at graduation when she shakes her hand and squeezes a little too tight and long.

She gets Michael out her system in the backseat of someone's Camaro. (It may or may not be his. She doesn't really care. It's all terribly exciting and Michael is, surprisingly, gentle to the point her heart skips like a thousand shoddy poems Aubrey's skim-read in class.)

Liking girls doesn't go on the list, but maybe it's not one of those things she likes to broadcast.

After the parties are all over and done and the fake ID rests in her drawer, protected by a barrier of clean underwear and socks, she lies on her bed and thinks if any of it was really enough.

Aubrey changes her mind because that's something people do. When the evidence changes, opinions should change too – anything else is just the stupid kind of stubbornness that helps no one. Besides, Posens don't believe in regrets so Aubrey can't allow herself to wallow in any more; she's a poor enough example of a Posen as things currently stand.

There's no possible way she can go through life without the closure of knowing who she liked more or if it's even possible to quantify something and bizarre and intangible as romantic (sexual? She's not sure about the nomenclature) without equal evidence for both sides. It's just irresponsible of her, really, not to confirm or deny her hypothesis.

So that's why she goes to Lydia's house after graduation and knocks at her door and somehow manages to turn a friendly greeting into a scientific proposition into her tangled in Lydia's bed sheets.

(Dully, she thinks that, if she's really serious about fair comparison, she'll need to redo this as a control in the back of a Camaro, but as silver-tongued as Aubrey can be she doesn't quite think she can talk Lydia into _that_.

Instead, she redoes Michael in a bed, for fairness, and that's great too, especially now she's getting the hang of it – maybe she was missing out on things with this whole 'priority' shtick.)

* * *

She gets all the colleges she wants, so 'priorities' do pay off in a way.

Lydia and Michael, not so much. Lydia accuses her of putting stepping back in the closet when she hears about Michael. (She's apparently a coward.) Michael accuses her of pretending to be gay so she seems deep when he hears about Lydia. (She's apparently a vapid preppy mess or at least something called a Poser. The pun's not ever good.) No one entertains third possibilities. It's all very trite and Aubrey doesn't quite have the energy to deal with either when the future's looming out on the horizon.

It's just a summer, yes, but shouldn't their plans be grander than bumming around their hometown with Aubrey Posen? That was apparently their plan, even though she'd made it abundantly clear they were more of a high school bucket list completion that a longstanding addition to the entry into college life. That's cold, probably, but liking someone doesn't mean tying yourself to them for the rest of your lives. Even marriage doesn't mean that. Aubrey likes both of them at the same time in, maybe different ways and she wanted to figure them out. She did now and it's all rather disappointing.

Wanting things is always nice than having them. Lydia was something easier to handle when she was shy mystery covering passionate debate and Michael easier to understand when he was a causeless rebel with poor taste in clothes. Maybe its not the sex that changes things in so much as it exposes the bit of them she willed herself not to see. (Knowing people can't be all that terrible, though. Dimly, Aubrey will admit maybe this was not the best application of methodology, but never aloud.) Aubrey still doesn't quite get the big deal. Gyrating bodies, heady pulses, bodily fluids. Sex was enjoyable and orgasms were fun, but neither felt quite worthy to compose epics or start wars over.

It's not like she doesn't care for them. She likes them, she does, and it shows because of how surprisingly difficult it is for her to choke this sense of nausea and panic down when Lydia's shouting and crying at her doorstep. It shows in the way something in her chest cracks when Michael can't meet her in the eye whenever they pass each other on the street. It exists, it has to, even if she doesn't know how to label it or talk about it or ever stop it happening.

Four years is a long time to spend anywhere, especially for her. So she defaults to the MO of earlier life to cut and run. It would have happened anyway. Aubrey's not really sure how to operate with a plan that's longer term than the three-year stretches of duty her father usually keeps up. Three years has become a standard unit of time in her head, nameless, but easy to calculate and as native to her thoughts as hours and minutes are to a passerby. Four years, though, is a mistake. It's actually funny how much an extra twelve months can mess with your head.

This is a pivotal moment in life, she reasons. The fallout in her own head she can deal with. She's paid her remittances to Michael and Lydia in taciturn apologies and letters in impeccable cursive. Clean up has passed; it's time to begin the new op.

If she packs her bags, it's going to be because she wants to.

* * *

A hug would be too much to ask.

She knows. Maybe it's selfish, but she still wants one. (She wants a lot of things. Thankfully, that's just a prerequisite to ambition, so she can wave away the guilt.)

It hurts him. It hurts him to be close to her. It hurts him to be close to anyone. She'll never be able to pity her father (not the man who sticks out in her memories like the mountain Atlas turned into, not even when he'll be old and in a bed that smells of antiseptic) but she can understand him. It's a hedgehog's dilemma. Her parents have grown around each other like gnarled tree branches, lost together over an ancient, withering temple. They're the only ones who can be permitted to hold each other like that. Maybe one day she'll have the same, but she's not sure she wants to.

There are plenty of things she wants. She has a list. He's only involved in a few of them.

A hug is too much to ask. But before she goes, when he stuff is all packed up in the car and out of the house, he looks her straight in the eye (it's like mirrors reflecting each other into infinity) and puts his hand on her shoulder. He doesn't smile. He just squeezes once, tight, like his hand can't move.

He nods.

* * *

Barden University isn't where her father envisioned her going. Barden may not have the most excellent league table results in the nation, but its music school is outstanding and its joint intellectual property and media courses are highly praised. Both are more than enough for Aubrey.

It's a small campus. That factored into her considerations too. It's not like Aubrey doesn't _like_ people; it's just that they're _tiring_ and if she's going to get to know some, it'd be in her best interests for it to be a reasonable number. Actual, genuine sociability (as opposed to the prim veneer useful of month-long stints of companionship) and the ability to achieve it are on a list of things she wants. There are people who have friendships that last lifetimes. Aubrey doesn't need _that_ but it'd be nice to figure out a way to keep in touch with someone.

She's learning things from her mother again. Namely, while her father may see the world as one big fight where he's clawing to stay afloat, her mother sees the world as a network of things to be used (but only if you let them use you back, carefully). Aubrey remembers all the things she admired as a child and realized that the fluid power never went away – she was just too caught up in her own skin to notice out it looked in a different light. There's still that dissonance, though. It's still a costume that won't fit, that pulls at the wrong angles. Aubrey's still her father's daughter – still the rock that's caught up in the rapids, trying to roll uphill, instead of the water that gamely shifts things around.

By now, she's had one epiphany at least. She's not supposed to reuse the costumes. She's supposed to make her own.

* * *

There are a lot of things Aubrey doesn't like about herself, but she's working on it. When you operate on a project with as large a scale as that, it's very important that you see the whole picture. This has been Aubrey's problem for the last eighteen years, actually. She still doesn't know what that picture is, because she sadly wasn't born with an instruction manual (though her father did his darnedest to try and write her one with a copy of his). However, She knows what the pictures _aren't_ and a step in the right direction is always a step worth taking.

There a million things she could do with her life but a very finite amount of time to complete them in. Aubrey doesn't have time to thumb through catalogues of self-doubt and loathing when she could be out taking over the world. Barden University enables her wishes. Not broadcasting parts of herself worked out spectacularly (that is, not in the slightest) last time around so this time she's employing different tactics.

There's music thrumming everywhere and art in the bones of the very institution. She signs up for more things than she'll commit to, but half of them are try-outs and auditions so things will cut themselves clean naturally. She just wants to be seen. She wants to be seen for everything she is instead of the things people assume about her.

The girl at the booth hands her the forms with a warm smile. She's wearing a flannel shirt, a size too big and in clashing shades of plaid, and an asymmetrical haircut. Aubrey fills them in with a well-practiced hand and proceeds to collect every one of the little pamphlets they're handing out.

The banner for Barden University's LGBTQ association is painted in faded rainbows against off-white (stained with coffee in some places) and hangs sullenly from a rocking table (one of the legs in too short) with a tablecloth that doesn't even reach the floor (the chairs are pretty shitty too). Any one of these things in and of itself would be tolerable, but combined they suggest standards that should offend even the poorest of sensibilities.

Next year, Aubrey will fix that.

* * *

Aubrey is in college.

You fight for things you want. Aubrey's father raised her to do as much. Her mother did too, in her own way. There are plenty of types of fight and plenty of types of feelings. She still doesn't know her way around either.

But she'll fight even if she doesn't know what her cause is.


End file.
